I'm trying to do the lighting in this room and having some trouble getting interesting lighting. It probably stems from a basic lack of understanding on my part, but I would love if I could tell you a bit about my project and maybe get some feed back.

The first image below is a concept that I made. I used photoshop to get the lighting looking what i thought was interesting and I think it turned out pretty decent.

The next image is a shot of the actual room straight from Vray. I am trying to get the lighting to be more interesting and wondering if anyone has and tips/advice.

Also side note. How many lights is too many? I am planning on having some LCD screens, and and a holographic projection down at the end of the hall way on a table. But knowing very little i feel i might over kill it way quicker than I mean to.

why dont you get some screen grabs from sci fi films and use them as reference. see how the masters do it. alien,moon,space odessy etc, they might inspire you in different directions. thats prob what i would do.

where do you want the viewer to look? ttheres no real clear focus point in your cg image as opposed to your photoshop one.

Still making some tweaks, I think that i want the tarp to have some transparency. I would like to be able to maybe see just a slight bit of clouds or the sun rising in the distance out side. Not positive just yet.

I'm by no means a lighting expert but I'll try to give some crits. Are you using global illumination for your scene or are you lighting with fill lights? If you are lighting with GI, I would definitly add some LCD screens as you proposed since this will break the monotonous white lighting a little and definitly add an interesting effect. If you are lighting with fill lights, try adding some color to them to, once again, break the white a little.

I really like your renders so far, but I think that the last one is over-saturated (remember that as you go into the distance, things gets more and more desaturated (for example: that blue thing on the middle-left looks closer then it should be (all because of saturation, imho))).

Originally Posted by Jdunay:Still making some progress. I plan on bluring most the stuff in the distance to the right

If you mean Dof - then don't.
Dof is strong only on macro shots, not on the wide shots like yours.
I think dof here would look very unnatural.

Originally Posted by Jdunay:
1. It's early morning.
2. You floating on a rock high in the atmosphere.
3. This environment is in working condition / kinda want to show it alive with activity, despite no characters in the scene.

2) Where is the fog then? I think you should put some fog, and it will make your scene bigger, and add an atmosphere to it. Some volumetric light (subtle, not overused) through the fog, could also add on the atmosphere.

3) Maybe some particle dust in motion blur? or small flies. Neon signs with letters (but only one letter glowing). Perhaps few spaceships in the distance flying.

You could also think adding some strong light (stronger then others) to define the shape of the objects. You have something like that in your concept (which is great btw).

Hope you will get some of what I wrote usefull. I also often struggle with light.

Cut out the lighting of the Holograms to get some of the early morning lighting working. Also pumped up the samples and the threshold, trying to finalize my quality settings so I can render out this set of frames and start the work on the composite.

I'm working on some environment fog and lighting in a separate file so that will have to wait for post. Also obviously the tarp has been pulled out just so I can better render times and have a little more control over the light.

My initial thoughts are that I need to bump up the shadows a bit and drop the lighting on the floor a bit just to give it a little more early morning feel. Also I'm slightly embarrassed about my render times per frame, right now I'm just slightly over an hour for what you see. Does that sound like way too much? If so maybe I need to optimize more.

The advice I got last time was so helpful! Hopefully ya'll have some more tips for me! Thanks!

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